Free Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons by Dane Hartman Page A

of a time to go vacationing in Beantown,” Collins exclaimed. Their business was finished for the moment, so Harry took Collins’ stopping in front of the Beacon Street HQ as a cue for his exit. Harry pulled back the latch and opened the door.
    “You’ll stay in touch?” Collins asked as Harry got halfway out the door.
    “I’ll call when I get a room,” Harry replied, lifting himself out onto the sidewalk.
    “I figure it doesn’t have to be said,” Collins called out the open passenger door, “but call me if you plan to leave town anytime soon.”
    “You’re right,” said Harry. “It didn’t have to be said.” He closed the door. Collins honked once and drove away, Harry’s Magnum still on his dashboard.
    Harry went up the Unitarian office building’s steps. The front door was locked. He walked all the way around the building. There were no lights on and no sign of a live-in custodian. Harry walked down the street to the intersection of Beacon and Charles streets. Charles looked far more lively, so he took a right onto it. He walked until he found a drugstore with an old-fashioned wooden telephone booth, complete with a recent directory.
    He looked up “Donovan, Shanna.” He got the number, slipped a dime in the slot, and dialed. There was no answer after ten rings. He asked the woman behind the counter for directions and walked to Shanna’s apartment. It was a cellar room on a side street near the Charles River and Storrow Drive. Harry walked down the steps and knocked.
    He waited for fifteen minutes, alternately knocking and sitting. While he waited, he thought. And while he thought, the depression came at him again.
    There may have been something in what Linda had said. It didn’t seem likely, but Harry had seen stranger things happen in his career. In a world where people killed each other because they didn’t like Mondays, anything was possible. It was even possible that out of the millions of families on the Earth, a bunch of starving, knife-wielding Indian lovers had marked Shanna out for an execution.
    It had been a rotten day. Superman had taunted him while he was getting an acute case of jet lag, he had broken two radios, he had nearly gotten creamed in an orange Pinto, he had argued with his favorite kin, and he had broken up a seemingly non-existent attempted murder. Harry was hungry, Harry was tired, and Harry was depressed.
    He took the edge off of the first problem by finding a little steakhouse on the corner of Charles and Beacon streets which char-broiled a T-bone to his order. He took care of the latter two problems by taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and searching out the Sack 57 Hotel. It was across the street from a Benihana restaurant and built on top of a Howard Johnson’s. He rode up to the eleventh floor empty-handed. He knocked on the door of room 1115. Terri the stewardess, unlike the rest of the women in his life, was in.
    She was wearing a beautiful silk robe and that was all. She had let down her golden blonde hair. Without her shoes she came up to Harry’s neck. He went to bed with her hoping he’d think he was back in California by the time the sun rose.
    She had left when the phone rang the next morning. At first Harry had thought “fuck it,” but then he considered that Terri might have had an accident on the way to work. Maybe she hadn’t made the plane. Maybe it was her superiors calling to find out if everything was all right. Maybe it was Collins who had found her eye in her handbag and was calling whoever might be there to say that she had been sacrificed to the American Indians’ gods. At this point, Harry wasn’t disregarding any possibilities. He rolled over and picked up the phone receiver.
    “Hello,” he said.
    “Harry?” was the breathy reply. “Is this Harry, Shanna’s relative?”
    Harry wanted to think about it, but dealing with a question like that in someone else’s hotel room could take a lot longer than the caller was willing